I had a plan on the post, but forgot it when it was time to write it, but then remembered too late. The bonus? You get these memes instead. Some of these (the longer text one on the crows, for example) are old favorites of mine.
How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family
“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather
Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)
Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.
There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?
No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.
Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.
Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?
Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.
Kids? Such a constraint!
The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.
This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.
The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.
A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.
I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”
But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.
Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.
Enter the wrecking crew.
First?
Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.
“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.
I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.
And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.
Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.
Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.
Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.
They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.
All of these are profoundly anti-family.
The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.
People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.
Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.
Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.
Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”
Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.
And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”
Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”
Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:
- All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
- Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
- Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
- Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
- Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
- Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?
It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.
Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.
None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”
My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.
Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”
The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.
We were fat, happy, and gullible.
We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”
Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.
Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.
Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.
Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.
Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.
The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.
17 Hilarious Things To Think About On Friday
“That’s just morbid thinking.” – Return of the King
Women are not good at multitasking. Just tell one to sit down and shut up and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a numbered listpost of random thoughts, so here it is. I spiced it up with memes, so here are 17 things to think about on a Friday.
- The Universe is vast, and it’s certain that there is life out there on other planets, in fact I’ve predicted that we’ll find it in my life time. I’m not sure if there is intelligent life out there, but if there is, I am certain that aliens are not vegans because they would have contacted us to tell us about that already. Besides, if the government tells me that aliens are real, in 2026 I’ll immediately think they’re lying.
- The U.S.S. Gerald Ford was stationed with strike aircraft ready to attack Iran, and then their plumbing failed. To make repairs, they decided to stop off at the island of Crete, which makes this the first plumbing clog that has been fixed by adding Greece.
- Some are applauding that an American-born Hispanic is now the leader of the CJNG cartel. I say that’s colonialism and am holding out until they have a trans or gay cartel leader.
- Blacks are upset that a white guy said a word they don’t like at an awards ceremony. It is wonderful to see the oppressed multi-millionaire blacks responding to that oppressor man with Tourette’s syndrome with all the hate they can muster. Imagine if he had been dyslexic. He could have offended the redheads as well.
- India has ordered its citizens to leave Iran immediately, proving that Iran has some advantages. Thankfully, if India orders them out of the United States, we’ll only need one train. Shhhh, nobody tell them there is no rail service to India.
- The Andrew formerly known as Prince has proved that they even like to keep breeding close after railing his nephew’s wife (allegedly) before his nephew did, but it’s okay because she only did it for money back then. Did you hear about Meghan Markle’s tragic car accident? I think they have it planned for next month.
- Gavin Newsom told a black audience that since he’s dyslexic, just like them, he can’t read. But if you ask Harvey Weinstein, Gavin’s wife sure can breed. Gingers can’t be reached for comment, but Gavin was quoted as saying he sure was hungry for some fried chicken and watermelon.
- Cats have amazing self-esteem, nearly as high as a Millennial, though I’ve never seen a triggered cat in therapy for past trauma.
- What does a GloboLeftist ask his wife after sex? “Is he going to go home now, or did you want me to make you two breakfast?”
- I went on the DOJ website and when I wanted see one of the files, I got the creepy feeling that the DOJ is recruiting for Epstein.
- Everybody is an arch-villain in at least one other person’s story. Make it count, and ex-wives don’t count. I say go big: alienate your children.
- Kim Jong-Un is a pretty snappy dresser and probably has some pretty radical tattoo sleeves, but what happens when he starts to lift and take Ozempic®?
- I’m just waiting for the wave of GloboLeftist parents killed in the middle of the night by their children. Why? Because think of the real estate opportunities!
- 90% of the GloboLeft’s political agenda is a series of sexual fetishes pretending to be a political party. The other 10% is self-loathing and tears of impotent rage.
- Europe may be in the process of being invaded by violent Arabs and Africans and scheming Indians, but they sure can make bottle caps that don’t end up in the storm sewer.
- People wonder if we will be able to communicate one day with an alien species. Some wonder if we will be able to communicate with animals. Me? I just want the Indian telemarketers to stop calling my cell phone.
- Almost every problem existing in the world could be solved by sending people back to their home countries and by telling women “no” to most questions. Okay, technically that solves all the problems in Western countries and still leaves the third world as the third world. But when we tell the women, “no, that’s not our problem” then those problems will solve themselves. Or it won’t. But I wouldn’t know about it because we’ll have cut those countries off of the Internet.
Jugaad And The Mumbai Mafia
“India’s a black hole.” – World War Z
I never got scammed by the Nigerian Prince. His version of Purple Rain was awful.
When I did the first Indian post, I didn’t expect to do a second. And now, what, is this the third? Why a third post?
Indians are speedrunning themselves into being the most hated minority in the United States. And they’re doing it in record time, like they’re trying to beat the low score record on “Wheel of Karma®.”
Indians used to call themselves the “model minority.” Cute. But let’s be real, they never stacked up very well against the Swedish Bikini Team or the Japanese Waifu Squad. Okay, the Indians will never be able to be loved like those groups, but what are they doing to make themselves so hated?
I heard a Waifu is like the square root of -100. A perfect 10, but imaginary.
Well, let’s start with jugaad. What’s jugaad?
Not as in “joo gaadda see this,” like Tony Soprano might say. Jugaad is, well, an Anon from /pol/ nailed the definition:
“Jugaad is the dishonest and deliberate bending of the rules and laws to one’s favor. In India, such underhanded and self-serving behavior is celebrated, especially among the upper/middle classes. It can also mean ‘doing the bare minimum to get by’ which is why Indian coding, craftsmanship, etc., is so terrible.”
Ouch. Kicked straight in the Microsoft©.
But we see jugaad continually exhibited by the Indians who have fled that paradise of the world’s largest trash mountain stunning Mumbai skyline and open sewage the Ganges. They cheat everyone at everything. And when there are bunches of them, they cheat in organized groups that would make the Mafia blush.
What do cheaters do after they die? They lie still. (as found)
When one Indian is hired, immediately their main goal is to hire other Indians, which increases their Izzat (link below). But it also gives them co-conspirators. Recently it’s coming to light that many H-1B visa holders are sharing their visa with trainloads of Indians. They all come here and work in substandard conditions, at least by American standards.
Why would they do that? Living six to a room in the United States is still 1000 times better than being in a nice place in India. And Americans, they’re so easy to cheat, coming from that high-trust culture. I’ve pointed out before how at least some of the hotels are engaged in human trafficking, drug trafficking, labor abuses, and (probably) money laundering (link below). I mean, illegals from South America, Africa, and even jihadis from the Middle East come to the country and the GloboLeftElite and CommerceChamberCohorts can’t get enough of them.
The Invasion of the Industry Snatchers: Patel Motels and the Trucking Singhularity
Why are Indians different and liked less than violent criminals who eat cats? The Indians coming to the West have committed several unforgivable sins:
First, they are going after exactly the same sorts of jobs that the GloboLeft rank and file love: jobs where they can be gang hired and protected by big systems, be it screwing up software at Microsoft® or working for the government or working in an HR department or selling stock in a company with a non-functional Alzheimer’s drug.
Looking at you, Ramaswamy, since that is classic jugaad.
Vivek was going to give a seminar on how not to be defrauded, but cancelled it. Tickets are non-refundable.
These are the safe, air-conditioned hiding spots where pierced-hair-color activists planned to coast until they gender-transitioned. Now? They’re filled with Indians doing the bare minimum at with half the hair dye and double the relatives.
These are things that GloboLeftists want to do with their own weirdly pierced and unnatural hair color gang, and to watch Indians poach their jobs is, well, triggering for them.
What’s a Leftist’s favorite film? Minority Report. (as-found)
Second, Indians do commit crimes, it’s just that they’re not particularly endowed with height or power, so they have to do everything in parties of 10 or more because a single adult white guy could take on quite a few. And guns? I don’t think they have the upper body strength to hold one up, let alone carry it for any distance. GloboLeftist are much more in tune with importing actual bombers and murderers and people who pay back for the grift they take, like the Somalians.
True fact: India does really well at the Special Olympics®. And, India did beat Michael Phelps who only has 28 Olympic medals, but Phelps has more gold medals than India has silver and gold, combined. (as-found)
Third, GloboLeftism is inherently feminist. And women love strong and attractive men, and Indians . . . well . . . aren’t.
I saw one post by a woman who was crying. She had been on Tinder® and had received a funny, smart, well-thought-out message. The problem? It was an Indian that wrote it to her. She felt that if an Indian had taken that kind of time, that the Indian actually thought that he had a shot with her. If that was the case, she felt she must be pretty unattractive.
Ouch. She would have rather had a message from a broke criminal on parole than an Indian.
Not at all creepy. (as-found)
You can be anything you want to a GloboLeftist woman, but don’t be unattractive. Even worse, don’t be needy, creepy, or trigger a disgust reaction. Indian males tend to put check marks into all of those boxes for Western women.
Remember, women and feminized men make up the footsoldiers and the pocketbook of the GloboLeft. They’ll put up with anything that they can mentally morph into a child for them to care for, likely out of guilt from the kids they’ve murdered before birth, but they simply can’t look at Indians and see them as something they’d want to care for.
This is what happens when you come for their lazy white girl jobs. (as-found)
The final point: Their customs are alien.
Not “worship a rock in Mecca” alien.
Not “bat-soup for breakfast” alien.
We’re talking covering themselves in cow poop on purpose, drinking pee and eating poop, worshiping a blue monkey-god that looks like a rejected Marvel™ character, and treating streets like the world’s largest public restroom.
Shoes? Optional.
Hygiene standards? Also optional.
Forget microplastics: macroIndians are more of a hazard.
How rousing! (as-found)
We built the greatest high-trust society in history on the assumption that people would mostly play fair because reputation mattered and neighbors noticed. But they exploited the same system the GloboLeft created to destroy high-trust America. The results are predictable: broken software, ghost employees, and chain-migration apartment complexes that smell like disappointment and curry.
Indians are exposing, at scale, how fragile the whole “just let anyone in” experiment really is. And the GloboLeft? They’re not mad at the Indians. They’re mad they got out-jugaaded at their own game.
Well, it’s not all bleak. Maybe Tony Soprano could pay one $20 to start his car every morning?
How To Break A Society, Part I
“Half measures are the curse of it. A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use.” – Red Dragon
The Andrew formerly known as Prince.
Picture this: I leave my keys in the truck overnight. Windows down. Wallet on the dash. Next morning? Still there. Nothing missing, though a cat might have explored an empty burger wrapper. No viral TikTok™ of some “youth” doing donuts in my F-150®.
Absurd? No.
And not because Big Brother has cameras up the backside of every squirrel, but because back in the day people just didn’t do that crap. The neighbors would have known who did it. Moms would have heard about it at church, and the father of the kid would have heard about it from his boss.
Shame, accountability, and consequences work better than ankle monitors.
That was the power of societal norms. Invisible fences made of “What will people think?” And the Founding Fathers knew it. They told us so.
Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and some lady asked what they’d given us. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.” Not “if the government keeps it for you.” Not “if we pass enough laws.” If you can keep it.
John Adams was even blunter in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
They weren’t kidding.
I shocked the postman by opening the door completely nude. I think what surprised him the most was that I knew where he lives.
Just like the Constitution, the libertarian dream only works when people self-circumscribe their own behavior. An 85,000-page federal code of regulations telling me not to steal if my conscience (and the fear of my neighbors shunning me like a rabid raccoon with diarrhea at a picnic) already does the job. The Constitution assumed a pretty genetically homogeneous people who spoke the same language, mostly went to the same church, read the same Bible, and agreed that punching your neighbor over a fence line was a last resort, not the premise of a YouTube™ video.
Some people broke the rules. Always have, always will no matter the civilization. But back then the system didn’t turn justice into a CBS® series lasting twenty years. The mean time from sentence to rope?
Often weeks or a few months, not the decades-long death-row vacation with three hots, cable, and taxpayer-funded lawyers we enjoy today. Were innocents sometimes executed?
Almost certainly.
But swift, mostly impartial justice beat the hell out of vigilante posses or letting killers out on technicalities to murder yet again. A society that can’t punish the guilty quickly loses the ability to protect the innocent at all.
I stand behind Alec. It’s safer than standing in front of him.
Fast-forward to post-World War II America. Streets were so safe kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on. Doors stayed unlocked. Factories hummed, wages rose, and the biggest scandal in most towns was somebody skipping the church potluck. Prosperity wasn’t just money: it was a stable and predictable life.
That bored the revolutionaries of the 1960s half to death.
They looked at this overwhelmingly safe, secure, prosperous society made of families in traditional family roles and said, “Nah, too square.” The GloboLeftist project kicked into high gear with the Great Society.
Lyndon Johnson and his crew didn’t just want to help the poor. No. They wanted to remake society. The guardrails of conformity had to go. Why? Because the norms of self-restraint, local reputation, and actual community stood in the way of central control.
Take lending, for example. Let’s say I wanted a home loan in 1955. My local banker didn’t just run a credit score, because they didn’t exist. He would have called my pastor: “Does Wilder show up on Sundays,? He does? Any rumors about his behavior? PEZ®, eh? That’s a bit odd.”
Local money stayed local. My mortgage would have literally been made from the savings of the people I saw at the grocery store. Or, rather that The Mrs. saw at the grocery store, since why would a married man go to the store?
Good families got a break if junior was speeding? Sure. Outsiders had to prove themselves? Absolutely. But it worked because everyone was playing the same cultural game.
If King Charles was anymore inbred, he’d be a sandwich.
Then came the 1960s and beyond.
Mass migration became deliberate policy. Civil rights were the noble public excuse, but the real play was splintering the old society so it could be replaced with something more compliant. Free association?
Gone.
You can’t choose who you hire or rent to without risking a lawsuit. Schools?
Prayer out, social engineering in.
Education standards?
Lowered faster than a politician’s principles.
Family?
Oh, boy.
Women used to save themselves for marriage. Even when I was a kid, that was still the norm in most places and led to more than one frustrating Saturday night.
Body count back in the 1950s? Usually one, and it came with a ring and a white dress. Fast-forward one lifetime from the Great Society: sophomore year of college and some girls are racking up body count numbers higher than a Call of Duty™ leaderboard.
No-fault divorce, welfare that paid better for single moms than married couples, and a nonstop cultural drumbeat that “settling down” was oppression led not to the Great Society but the Great Breakdown. The nuclear family, once our bedrock, got nuked. Fatherless homes exploded. The Great Society didn’t cure poverty: it subsidized it while making dads optional and government mandatory.
My WIFI router is in the basement. You could say this post comes from a LAN down under.
Every facet of life got the treatment.
Religion was pushed out of the public square. “Under God” became hate speech. Local norms replaced by federal mandates. You couldn’t even form a private club without worrying about quotas.
The explicit goal?
Fragment the connections that made America 1960 a powerhouse. Replace them with government strings. Make people dependent on D.C. instead of their neighbors, their church, or their own character.
And it worked.
One generation. That’s all it took.
We went from “mind your own business but don’t be a jerk” to needing sensitivity training to say “good morning” without committing a microaggression. We went from “your reputation follows you” to “my truth” where accountability is optional and consequences are for white men.
The absurdity peaks when you realize the same people who tore down the norms now act shocked at the results.
“Why is crime up? Why are families falling apart? Why can’t we have nice things?”
Because they spent 60 years telling people the guardrails were bigotry. They replaced “don’t do that, people will talk” with “do whatever feels good, you slay, queen.” They swapped local bankers who knew your grandma for algorithms that approve loans based on your zip code, skin tone, and whether your social media likes the right causes.
A fragmented society built on ephemeral values: “my feelings, my identity, my government check” cannot magically produce the disciplined, self-restrained people who built the 1960 powerhouse. We can’t have a republic of free men when half the population thinks “freedom” means no consequences and the other half thinks the Constitution constrains the government too much.
The fall wasn’t accidental.
I ate in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet. There were endless pastabilities.
It was engineered during a time of plenty, when people were fat and happy enough to believe the sales pitch. “Break the old norms, they’re oppressive!” Turns out the oppression was mostly keeping humans from doing what humans do when they’re not in a civilization and are left unchecked.
I don’t think we can keep the republic Franklin talked about from where we are. Adams knew the reason: paper and ink don’t enforce morality. People do.
Or they don’t. And when they don’t, the government is happy to step in with a smile and a 10,000-page regulation.
The norms are gone. The absurdity remains. And the bill?
It’s due, with interest.
Why Henry VIII Would’ve Killed for Your Tuesday
“Dying in our sleep is a luxury that our kind is rarely afforded. My gift to you.” – Kill Bill: Volume 1
I guess he had a bad heir day.
Henry VIII could have anyone killed in England killed, whenever.
That’s a historical level of flex, right?
“Off with his/her/their/xir head!” and boom, problem solved. The only way he could have had a more complete solution is if he had ye olde Hellfyre Missyll that he could have obliterated the parts with. Hank had more wives than most guys have pairs of underwear, threw parties that made Vegas look like a church potluck, and ate so much roasted swan he probably needed a crane to get out of bed.
Yet the poor bastard was miserable. Hank’s leg was a festering horror show of oozing sores that never healed. Doctors, if you could call them that, mashed it with hot pokers and prayed to Saints who were clearly not looking out for Henry.
Summers? Hank oozed sweat in every royal crevice like a Somalian in a daycare because air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet. Winters? Drafty castles that made your average Motel 6® feel like the Ritz™.
Fresh vegetables in January? Forget it, unless you counted the mold on last year’s turnips. Antibiotics? Nope. He died at 55 looking like a bloated, angry grape because a simple infection laughed at him.
Bill Gates claimed that it was hard to give away $100 billion. Then he discovered divorce.
Meanwhile, the poorest person reading this right now has:
- Climate-controlled comfort (except when the power goes out and we all act like it’s the apocalypse)
- Aspirin that kills headaches faster than Henry could yell “treason”
- Strawberries in February flown in from well, wherever, for $2.99 a pint
- A phone in their pocket with more computing power than NASA used to put men on the Moon, back when they still did that sort of thing
And we complain the Wi-Fi is slow.
As a society, we’ve lost the plot. We chase the next luxury like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon, never noticing we’re already living better than every king who ever lived.
Marie Antoinnette didn’t like the chopper that took her out of France.
That’s where fasting, prayer, and meditation come in.
They don’t add luxury. And they’re not anti-luxury, either. Instead, they intensify life real life by pulling away things that dull it. They rip the blindfold off so you can finally see the ridiculous abundance that’s been hiding in plain sight.
Take camping, which is another life-intensifier. Or better yet, backpacking, because backpacking is camping for people who like suffering without a car nearby. You hike ten miles with everything you own on your back. Hot shower? Nah. Cold beer? Dream on, pal.
Clean socks after three days? Suddenly they feel like silk sheets at the Four Seasons®. That lukewarm instant coffee at sunrise after a 14,000-foot summit? Nectar of the gods. And that single cigar you packed for the top?
It tastes better than the $80 Cuban some hedge-fund guy is smoking in his climate-controlled man cave. The Luxury Meter resets. Hard. The stuff I took for granted becomes decadent again.
I felt motion sickness on the airplane yesterday. It didn’t help having all of those people screaming for lifejackets and rafts.
That’s exactly what fasting, prayer, and meditation do as I get older, except I don’t have to carry a 40-pound pack or sleep on rocks.
Let’s start with fasting, because I actually do this every week and some of my happiest days are while I’m doing it.
Yes, I’m the weirdo who smiles while hungry. Judge away. After 72 hours without food, that first bite of whatever I eat next hits different. It’s not “dinner.” It’s a religious experience.
Last week I broke a fast with a salad of lettuce, and my own dressing (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and Frank’s Hot Sauce™.
I swear the lettuce tasted like it was grown by angels on Mount Olympus. I actually said “thank you” out loud to vinegar. The Mrs. asked me, “Are you planning on starting a cult?”
“No, it’s too hard to find enough people who are willing to shave off all the hair on their bodies. Just no commitment nowadays.”
Fasting reminds me that food isn’t a background app: it’s a miracle, a gift. My ancestors fought wolves for scraps, and won. That’s why I’m here.
Right now I’m so hungry I could eat my watch, but that would be time consuming.
Henry VIII had entire forests of deer murdered for his gouty pleasure and still died angry. Me? I can open the fridge and there sits last night’s leftover steak and a bag of midget tomatoes.
Fasting turns the volume down on “I want more” and turns it up on “Holy crap, this is amazing,” when one of those ripe tomatoes explodes flavor in my mouth as I bite into it. Prayer does the same thing, but with gratitude instead of hunger and with fewer seeds.
I’m not talking about the fancy stained-glass, organ-music version. I’m talking about the five-minute reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” or just sitting there praying “thanks” for all the little miracles in my life, like cigars. Thanks for the roof that doesn’t leak. Thanks for the truck that started this morning. Thanks for antibiotics that would’ve saved Henry’s leg and probably at least one of his marriages if the Habsburgs weren’t trying to kill him. Thanks for the fact that I can complain about gas prices while eating pineapple from Costa Rica on a pizza in February.
I think that if I do this regularly my brain chemistry changes. I cease envying the guy with the bigger bank account and start noticing that I’ve never missed a meal, except on purpose.
And then there’s meditation, which I used to think was for hippies in hemp pants smoking hemp and praying to a bong with hi-fi playing sitar music in the background.
Turns out it’s just shutting up for five minutes. Sit. Breathe. Notice the thoughts racing around like caffeinated squirrels.
After a few minutes the squirrels calm down. And suddenly I notice things. The warmth of the coffee mug. The feeling of my head against the back of my chair that just happens to adjust six ways. The ridiculous luxury of quiet.
Only self-aware people will understand this joke. You know who you are.
Henry VIII never had five minutes of peace: someone was always trying to poison him or marry him or overthrow him or he had another wife to kill.
I can have it peace and quiet whenever I want, and it costs exactly nothing.
When I do all three together it’s like a factory reset on my soul. The constant “I need more” noise fades.
I’m not saying sell everything and move to a cave and become a monk. I like my truck, my cigars, and my central heat as much as the next guy. But I’m not going to let “luxury” make me the modern version of Henry VIII: rich in stuff, poor in joy, angry at the world because the sores never heal and the wives won’t die. These things remind me that the real luxury isn’t the next thing, it’s realizing the things I already have would’ve made kings weep with envy.
Though say what you want about Henry, he did have a cure for wives who had headaches.
Wednesday Dog Ate My Homework Memes
Feeling a bit tired tonight, so here are some memes in place of a proper post.
The Defeat Of The West?
“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises
I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.
I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.
The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.
In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom. In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China. The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope. It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.
Why did Princess Diana cross the road? She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.
I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar. Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.
On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going. The Ukraine war? It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff: we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.
One example: Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year. Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce. And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.
That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts. The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.
I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start. 0-0.
US manufacturing jobs? These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.
Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints. Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.
Why? The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent. After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West. Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.
Once a European midget asked me to hide him. I guess I can cache a small Czech.
Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion. Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution: Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void. Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.
Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence. Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015. “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism. In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”
This certainly defines the state of the West now. A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too. And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”. That leads to a national weakness.
This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize. This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat. To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff. To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production. That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.
My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.
Back to Todd: “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.” Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States? It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.
Todd’s conclusion: Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound. It could do whatever it wanted. The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022. But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.
The opposite happened. Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning. I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint. Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.
I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”
Now, my two cents: Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders. Pain is coming. NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.
Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever: nationalism trumps globalism. The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
As for me? I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.
Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose
“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club
Why are mathematicians always happy? They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.
“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus
Think back to the moment that were really content. Happy. Maybe it was after a nice steak. Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar. Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.
Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything. The moment is complete. It is as it is. I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with. I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee. In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.
W.C. Fields: “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite. With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”
This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time. It’s simple. Stop wanting what you don’t have.
Done. Easy. Unless it’s air. I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it. And water, yeah, I need that on occasion. Food? Not an issue. Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.
So, happiness is easy.
My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long. They’re now tanned gents.
Why then, are most people unhappy?
They want what they don’t have. In some cases, they want what they can never have. Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her. That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.
So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy. If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy. But, no, she’s made herself unhappy. And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible: she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have. In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.
After A.I., how will programmers make money? Selling their laptops.
This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her: she made it up. So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason: reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be. You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.
The post is outside of me. It’s something I made. I can choose what I can do with it. I can abandon it. I’ve done that about five times, I think. I can decide, “You know what, good enough.” I’ve done that a few times. But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy. Very happy. I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.
If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it. I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.
If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.
The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done. That’s why weed and vidya games are bad. They give bliss without accomplishment. It’s the easy road to happy.
But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment. I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about. I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control. If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.
When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?
But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.
That’s the definition of purpose. It might be small, like mowing the lawn. It might be big, like changing the world. But I get to choose. It should fit my talents. And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is. Well, at least to me. YMMV.
I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist. It’s overwhelming.
It makes one feel small, sometimes.
But me? I keep pushing. I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence: “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.” So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.
Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?
Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword. It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside. But this is one that I choose to carry. It’s one that I wish to have.
I control (mostly) my emotions. Being happy means not wanting. Except when I choose what I want. And right now? I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.
In that order. But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.
The Next Default, Gold, Bras, and Confiscation
“The wealth of Moria was not in gold or jewels but mithril.” – Fellowship of the Ring
Steel suppliers are facing high iron prices and low finished steel prices. They say it’s a terrible ore-deal.
What we call money was for the longest time gold. For . . . a long time, really. It has never quite been valueless and even jungle savages and pyramid builders (who had, I must remind you, no iPhones™ used it for trinkets because it was pretty.
But cash has gone to zero.
The phrase “Not worth a Continental” came about because the Continental Congress decided to print a lot of cash to fight the Revolutionary War. It worked, but the cash became valueless because they printed too much.
How bad was it?
Bad enough that a wheelbarrow of Continentals might buy you a loaf of bread, if the baker was using them to start his fire. It was a bad enough experience that the Framers of the Constitution tossed in the whole, “No State shall make anything but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
Then we went to gold because the Constitution said so. Gold worked for a while. There was a reset during the Civil War with the National Banking Act, which made paper “greenbacks” official tender. Lincoln needed cash to fund the Union army, so they cranked up the presses again. By war’s end, greenbacks were worth about half their face value, and people grumbled, but hey, at least the North bankers won.
I’m in shape for that, though. I exorcise regularly.
Then in the awful year of 1913, the Fed® was put into place, and the monkey business began anew. Another currency reset, first for World War I, where they suspended gold convertibility to print for the war machine. Huh. It’s like I’ve heard that before. When the value of the dollar started to increase in the Great Depression, Roosevelt came in and made owning significant amounts of gold illegal.
I mean, illegal for the plebs. Rich dudes could still own all they wanted, because, well, they’re rich. What don’t you understand about that, pleb? FDR’s Executive Order 6102 forced folks to turn in their gold at $20.67 an ounce, then he jacked the price to $35 overnight.
Instant 69% profit for Uncle Sam. Nice work, if you can get it.
Eventually, LBJ took all of the silver out of the money, too. In 1965, quarters went from 90% silver to clad junk, because Vietnam wasn’t going to fund itself. People hoarded the old real silver coins, and Gresham’s Law kicked in: bad money drives out good.
Finally, Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard as a “temporary emergency measure” in 1971. Temporary, my foot. It was the final nail in the gold coffin, all because we were spending like drunken sailors on wine, women, wars and welfare.
Was there panic? Confusion? Market turmoil? Riots in the streets?
Nah. None of that happened at any of these currency resets. Partially because people are distracted. Back then it was Vietnam protests or bra burnings or Watergate scandals.
Despite the name, when I wore The Mrs.’, I couldn’t do any more than usual.
And, partially because people still had dollars to spend that were worth something, right? I mean, until the inflation of the 1970s hit. People adapted, grumbled, but kept chugging along because what else were we gonna do? Start a revolution over milk prices?
All of these resets, every single one of them, happened because the United States government (or its precursor) had spent way too much, had too much debt, and didn’t want to pay it. It’s the old, “Hey, let’s you and me split the bill. Half is fair right? I mean, I had the steak and lobster and you had a salad, so 50-50 works.”
Except you don’t get to object.
This confiscation is what gold (and silver) holders, real physical metal holders, now worry about: the government coming for their gold and silver.
I am here to tell you that will never happen.
Never.
What’s the zodiac sign for a donut? Torus.
Why bother with door-to-door confiscation when they can just make it painful to use? History shows they prefer the sneaky route. What will happen is, say, that .gov will tax people who sell gold at a profit at a huge rate. 70%? 90%? Heck, maybe 110% if they get creative with penalties.
And no one will care. Why? Well, rich people will have insulated themselves from this by offshoring those investments: think Swiss vaults or Cayman trusts. The tax will probably only apply to individuals (so those with corporations won’t care, they’ll just LLC their stack), and the people who don’t have silver and gold will think that anyone who had any silver and gold probably deserves such a high tax rate.
“Greedy hoarders,” they’ll say, while scrolling through their InstaFace© feed of dancing feminists.
That’s one way. What’s another?
Mandate reporting on all precious metal sales over, say, $100. Turn your local coin shop into a snitch for the IRS®. Or tie it to “anti-money laundering” laws, making grandma’s heirloom coins suspicious. It’s not confiscation; it’s just “regulation for your safety.
“You can sell your gold and silver. And dollars, even, into a new currency!”
And only into that new currency. This new currency will be great! We’ll call it a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). It’s like crypto, but now the Fed® controls it!
I have a friend who is half-Indian. His name is Ian.
What could go wrong?
Well, from the perspective of the Fed©, absolutely nothing. They can make your CBDC evaporate unless you spend it: like digital milk in the fridge with an expiration date enforced by big brother. “Use it or lose it, citizen!”
They can track every cent (oops) dime that you spend. Bought too much ammo? Flag. Donated to the “wrong” cause? Freeze. They can stop transactions they don’t like. “Sorry, no more red meat, your carbon score’s too high today.”
They can use it to create an activity profile: “John’s been buying survival gear again; better send the social worker. Have her bring cigars and scotch to calm him down.”
It will, of course, all be for your own good. It’ll stop crime. And money-laundering.
And those rich people! It will stop them. I mean, sure they’ll have the fancy estates in France and Bill Gates will own half of the farmland in the country and also own Picassos and Renoirs and Monets and Manets and a Chinese antibiotics manufacturer, but it’ll really get him.
Bill Gates caught a very strong STD: Herpules.
Us plebs? We’ll get the full surveillance package.
Boy, those rich people are sure going to suffer if we force them to use CBDC.
So, we can keep our gold and silver. It’s just a barbaric relic. And we’re awful if we want to keep it since it’s probably anti-patriotic or pro-colonialism (depending on who is in office) to keep the gold and silver, which should be safely stored.
In a Central Bank.
For your own good.
And the CBDC? That’s as good as gold. It’s not like the Continental at all. And, it comes with a new iPhone® app.
What a deal!